of this truly impressive work not detract from it needlessly. PapersConcerning Robertson's Colony is the product of years of research andwill be relied on by scholars of the period for years to come. Its valuewill be much greater if materials are presented in a balanced and even-handed manner.Lamar University ADRIAN N. ANDERSONThe World of Colonel John W. Thomason, USMC: Artist, Writer,Marine. By Martha Anne Turner. (Austin: Eakin Press, 1984.Pp. xvi+4o5. Acknowledgments, preface, illustrations, bibliogra-phy, index. $19.95.)At once professional soldier, author, and war artist extraordinaire-in an era when the photographer had already displaced the combatartist as sole, or even chief, pictorial chronicler of the battlefield-Colonel John W. Thomason was assuredly the preeminent marine ofhis time. Thomason's self-illustrated literary works-among them FixBayonets!, Jeb Stuart, and Lone Star Preacher-reflect his experiencesin the marine corps actions of World War I, the Banana Wars of the192os, and his service as a company commander at the Peking legationin the war-torn China of the 1930s and are still widely read and re-spected by military buffs and historians.It was as artist, perhaps, that Thomason was to have his most abid-ing influence. His break with the rigidity of the battlefield art of hispast, his employment of the free-flowing line that tends to infuse hisfinished pictures with the action, the drama, and the immediacy ofthe sketch, has influenced all combat art since his time, and no mod-ern battlefield artist, including this reviewer, would gainsay his power-ful effect on the medium.Now Martha Anne Turner, who has written previously on Thoma-son for the Marine Corps Gazette, has addressed a wider audience withthis scholarly biography. Here the reader can recapture the romanceand intensity of Thomason's life from his youth in late nineteenth-century Huntsville, Texas-a town that had changed little since ante-bellum days and is portrayed here as strangely compelling and eerilyevocative-through his death of pneumonia in San Diego at the ageof fifty-one, literally worn out by the pace of his own existence. Inthe intervening chapters Turner describes the early flowering of hiscreative interests: Thomason's studies at the Art Students League ofNew York City and his subsequent job as reporter for the HoustonChronicle. Although he joined the marine corps on the day the United